Most of the Diary isn't even about my personal views, but an attempt to analyse the medical facts currently in public evidence (which may or may not be ultimately confirmed by the inquiry). The reason I wrote the diary was because most of the commentary I have read doesn't even go into the medical details - but make large assumptions as to what must have occurred. The presumption, on the "right to life" side seems to be that the lack of availability of abortion is never a risk factor for the mother. Equally, however, the Daily Kos presumption seems to be that of course it was the lack of an abortion with killed her, duh!

I don't think we do her memory any favours by presuming facts not currently in evidence. The husband obviously feels she was very wronged, and the least he can expect is an impartial, independent review of what went wrong. Long term, I don't think the abortion on demand viewpoint does itself any favours if it turns out that the lack of an abortion was not the main contributory factor to her death.

There was a comment from an MD on one of the Savita threads which basically said that not aborting was clearly medical malpractice, and the foetus was clearly the cause of the fatal septicemia.

So 'well, duh' would be entirely fair and accurate.

Certainly it's difficult to imagine any doctor without religious bias saying 'It's true you have a dead foetus inside you, but let's just leave it there and see if your condition improves, eh?'

It's true that Savita might have died anyway. But it's surely obvious that the odds of death would have been very greatly reduced to the point where it was very unlikely she would die - as opposed to the medical inaction which made it far more likely she would die.

So far as I can tell, medicine doesn't offer certainties.

But the reality is that any unbiased medical facility would have treated the situation as a medical emergency and aborted immediately, knowing this would tilt the balance of probability away from likely death to likely survival, and that this was a valuable and ethical thing to do.

The foetus wasn't dead and this is what delayed more aggressive/invasive treatment. All cases are different and I'm surprised an MD would comment so decisively without direct access to a lot more data than is currently in the public domain. Abortion is legal in Ireland if there is a "clear and substantial risk" to the life of the mother, so either the medical team didn't think that standard was being met, or the lack of legislation and legal certainty inhibited their response, or religious bias caused them not to act in the best interests of their patient.

Yes - and once in a trillion years it may happen that the baby/patient recovers - probably because of inaccurate diagnosis in the first place. Euthanasia, abortion, contraception, whatever - its all a sin because it compromises the sacredness of life in their eyes. Never mind that their concern for the actually living generally leaves a lot to be desired...